This past week the person who manages one of the worldâ€™s most important cryptography projects, Werner Koch,went from going broke to raising more than $100,000 for his project, GNU Privacy Guard. This is in addition to the $60,000 The Linux Foundationâ€™s Core Infrastructure Initiative (CII)dedicated to Werner last month. GnuPG is used not just to encrypt and authenticate email but provides the confirmation that software packages and releases are what they claim to be. Facebook, Stripe and others are answering the calls to support the individuals who are developing the worldâ€™s most critical digital infrastructure.

Last week I was in Italia at the Cisco Live! Milano event where I also had the opportunity to speak about OpenDaylight (ODL) and Software-Defined Networking (SDN). What stood out for me the most during my time there was the tremendous progress being made on technologies that are really disrupting the networking space SDN and NFV have been advancing innovation in the networking industry over the past few years, but itâ€™s still early, and not many of the technologies have made it out of the lab and into the networks â€“ until now. I joined developers in the Cisco DevNet Zone to get a look at the companyâ€™s SDN and NFV software and what I saw was a portfolio of applications, mostly based on OpenDaylight, that are advancing the transition to networks managed by software. By far, the high point was the CloudVPN, which is offering open APIs to allow developers to create their own apps, portals, and automation on top of the platform.

For the last ten years open source has expanded into more and more segments of the computing industry. But as we review 2014, a new story emerges: software development has fundamentally shifted toward an open source model. Especially for the infrastructure software used for scale-out computing, open source is the de facto choice; in fact, itâ€™s virtually impossible to find examples of scale-out infrastructure that is not open source.

Itâ€™s no longer debatable that most technologies today are built with open source software and collaborative development. Everyone knows this to be true. Whatâ€™s become more the topic of discussion in recent years is how to support and manage these massive, shared resources we call open source projects and the developers who work on them. That is why The Linux Foundation over the last couple of years has spent a lot of time identifying with its members existing or new open source projects that can transform technology or industries through collaboration. Taking a page...

Individuals inspire us. From the open source community to the maker community, individuals are changing the way software and hardware are built. Together they are advancing the most exciting areas of technology, from Linux to cloud and supercomputing to consumer electronics, the Internet of Things (IoT), commercial drones and much more. Hundreds of thousands of people are working today on what will be tomorrowâ€™s biggest innovations.